![]() But the poem does not stop after a single layer of division and reinterpretation. The poem separates the compound “handgun” for the same divinatory purposes that motivated ancient chaizifa: to understand the object, one reads its component parts. ![]() ![]() The most concrete example is the poem’s central object, a word that, in Chinese as in English, comprises the character for “hand” and the character for “gun": 手枪. The poem requires all this effort because it runs on chaizifa, the separation of words into their component characters, a practice once used for divination and fortune-telling. The poem appears in two separate free versions subtitled “after Ouyang Jianghe,” and once in an appendix that gives a more literal, annotated translation. The technical challenge of translating Ouyang Jianghe’s poetry is nowhere clearer than in the poem “Handgun,” which appears three times in the collection Doubled Shadows (2012), translated by Austin Woerner.
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